A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam.

• Author: Haberl, Ch. G.
• Position: Book review

A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam. BY HOLGER GZELLA. Handbuch der Orientalistik, vol. 111. Leiden: BRILL, 2015. Pp. xv + 451. $363.

In 2 Kings 18:26 and the parallel passage in Isaiah (36:11), Eliakim, who is majordomo to the Judean king Hezekiah, beseeches the Assyrian envoy to speak with him in 'aramit rather than ydhudit. Eliakim is not a linguist, so far as we know, and the distinction that he is trying to make is as much political as it is linguistic: speak the language of the kingdom of Aram-Damascus, which comprises the territories around Damascus and Aleppo, rather than that of the kingdom of Judea, in which we currently find ourselves. In Holger Gzella's latest publication, we learn the story of how these two men came to speak this idiom as a common tongue, how Eliakim came to make his request, so strange on the face of it, and why any of this should matter to us, among many other things.

In the text as we have received it, this 'aramit might have referred specifically to what Gzella describes as the "Central Syrian Koine" (pp. 67-72), in addition to the standardized administrative and literary language that superseded it, likewise described as 'aramit in the biblical books of Daniel (2:4) and Ezra (4:8). The former book also describes 'aramit as the language of the "Chaldeans," whom scholars posthumously elevated to the status of a nation state during the course of the early modern era, complete with a national territory ("Chaldea"), a national language ("Chaldaic"), and a national religion ("Chaldaism"), none of which could be said to have existed in any meaningful way outside of the minds of these scholars. For that reason, this same language was also described as Chaldaic, at least until Josef Markwart coined the term Reichsaramaisch to describe it in 1927. How 'aramit was transmogrified into Reichsaramaisch (or Achaemenid Official Aramaic as it is more generally known today) through the efforts of ancient states and modern scholars is an interesting but somewhat open question, and Gzella dedicates much of his account (pp. 105-211) to the status quaestionis.

Gzella is less evidently concerned with how something called "Aramaic" has become the subject of scholarly discourse, in the manner of some other cultural histories, and more with tracing the evidence for this phenomenon back into the historical record spanning from the early first millennium BCE to the advent of Islam. He nonetheless begins appropriately enough by furnishing us with some background (pp. 3-16), outlining those scholars whose authority precedes him, and from whom we have inherited such categories as Aramaic. In this regard, it ought to be noted that the use of this single term to signify the many languages that are the present subject of this discourse is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It and its cognates in other languages were vanishingly rare in the scholarly literature before the publication of Landau's 1819 landmark Rabbinisch-aramdisch-deutsches Worterbuch; plotting an n-gram, "Aramaic" surpasses "Chaldaic" in English-language scholarship only after 1858. In German, "Chaldaisch" still continued to be much more popular...